As the ink-jet printing technology develops, the market has imposed higher requirements on the accuracy of an ink-jet printed article. This requires the nozzle manufacturer to improve the print accuracy of nozzles. The print accuracy may be described by DPI (Dots Per Inch). Due to the limitation of the nozzle fabrication technology, the distance between nozzles can not be too small. Therefore, many nozzle manufacturers employ multiple rows of nozzles for splicing. In this way, the DPI of its projection on a direction vertical to the paper feeding direction is increased, thereby improving the print accuracy. However, this splicing method also brings a big problem for data processing, i.e. it is necessary to perform a split-delay processing on image lattice data according to an order of the nozzles so that the image is presented on a medium correctly.
If a software is used to perform the split-delay processing on lattice data of an image according to the order of the nozzles, the data split-delay processing may be achieved at a low cost by means of strong computation and huge memory resources of the computer. However, since the processing procedure involves a large amount of bit operations, it will greatly reduce the image processing speed, thereby reducing the print speed, which does not satisfy the current high speed print demand.
If hardware (e.g. a programmable logic device) is used to perform split-delay processing on lattice data of an image according to the order of the nozzles, it is possible to utilize the programmable logic device's advantage for bit operations. However, the operation of the split-delay processing needs a large amount of internal memories, and the cost thereof will be considerably increased.
Therefore, it can be seen that the above mentioned processing methods have a problem of a low print speed or a high cost.